Perspective

We have seen how Race has played a significant role in the United States to not only maintain a hierarchy of power but also a hierarchy of labor. This has helped me put slavery into a different perspective. The role it played is crucial to the current moment of "othering" the black community.

So then what is the significance of slavery today?

W.E.B. Du Bois asks similar questions we have been thinking about. He writes:
"What did it mean to be a slave? It is hard to imagine it today. We think of oppression beyond all conception: cruelty, degredation, whipping and starvation, the absolute negation of human rights; or on the contrary, we may think of the ordinary worker the world over today, slaving ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled his physical necessities to do this and not to do that, curtailed in his movements and his possibilities; and we say, here, too, is a slave called a 'free worker,' and slavery is merely a matter of name" (DuBois, Reader p.6-7).

Slavery in this light exemplifies the necessity to deploy race as a social structure to hierarchize labor in the "free world." I think this is critical to my understanding and to the course because it exposes the ways in which slavery has been re-established through multiple processes of subordinating the proletariat. DuBois here takes on a Marxist perspective to the Post-Industrial World. This article will be taken with me throughout the rest of my years as a student and hopefully scholar.

Thank you all for the wonderful discussions, they were truly insightful! Happy Holidays!

Best,
Nick Noriega